Adam Silver talks mid-market NBA Finals, new All-Star game format and the Mavs lottery
The Oklahoma City Thunder and Indiana Pacers will square off in the 2025 NBA Finals starting on Thursday night at the Paycom Center.
It's a matchup of two teams who play in mid-level markets, which always creates the conversation about how the sport's ratings will fare outside of NBA diehards.
On Wednesday's edition of "Breakfast Ball," NBA Commissioner Adam Silver offered up his take on why the matchup is great for the NBA.
"At the end of the day, we are a league of relatively small markets. The goal is to have a league where every team is in position to compete," Silver said. "It's been intentional, from our standpoint, to create a system, a collective bargaining agreement [CBA], that allows more teams to compete. We're going to have to go through a process of getting to the point where people are accustomed to tuning into the finals because the two teams deserve to be there, and it's the best basketball.
"If I asked somebody if they were going to watch the Super Bowl, they wouldn't say 'who's playing?' It's a national holiday. That's nirvana. If the Knicks are in the finals, there's a segment of our fan base that's going to watch that may not watch if it's other teams, but my job is to get people to love and follow this game, so that if you're a huge basketball fan, you should want to tune in to the finals because that's the best basketball."
It's the first time that the Thunder have appeared in the NBA Finals since 2012 and the Pacers' first trip to the championship round since 2000.
Here are some other notable tidbits from Silver's appearance:
The 2025 NBA Draft Lottery had plenty of fireworks, as the Dallas Mavericks — who were 11th in the lottery seeding with a 1.8 percent chance of getting the No. 1 pick — won the lottery.
Meanwhile, the Utah Jazz, who had the worst record in the NBA, fell from first to fifth, and the Washington Wizards fell from second to sixth. Dallas is expected to take Duke star and 2024-25 AP Player of the Year Cooper Flagg with the No. 1 pick.
The Mavericks, shooting up from No. 11 to No. 1 in the draft order after trading Luka Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers in February, drew criticism from the basketball world about the authenticity of the NBA Draft lottery. Silver provided his perspective on that narrative.
"The worst-performing team had a 14 percent chance of winning [the lottery], which means there was an 86 percent chance they wouldn't get it," Silver said. "Dallas had roughly a two percent chance [to win it]. The team that lost the most had a seven times better chance. Two percent is two percent. It's going to happen. When people say 'and therefore the lottery was broken,' I have a different view.
"The purpose of the lottery is to disincentive teams from tanking. Here, you had a team — regardless of whatever people think of that [Dončić] trade — that was trying to win. Then, Kyrie [Irving] got injured. Then, Anthony Davis got injured, and so, then they found themselves in the lottery. Odds are odds, and that's how it turned out."
The NBA has dabbled in several All-Star game formats in recent memory, the most recent one seeing four teams playing against each other in a tournament. Those teams were made up of two NBA All-Star teams, a Rising Stars team and a "World Team."
While Silver said that he wasn't "exactly sure what the format will be" for the 2026 All-Star Game, the commissioner expressed that he felt this year's "4-Nations Face-off" was a "huge success" and could serve as a potential model for the NBA. The "4-Nations Face-off" saw the United States, Canada, Finland and Sweden compete in a round-robin event earlier this year, with Canada defeating the United States in overtime of the title game. The NHL has several players who grew up outside the United States, primarily in Canada, while the NBA has several superstars who played internationally before coming to the NBA (e.g. three-time MVP Nikola Jokic, two-time MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo and Doncic).
On that note, each of the last two No. 1 picks in the NBA Draft (Victor Wembanyama and Zaccharie Risacher) were players who competed professionally in France, with each of the first two selections in the 2024 NBA Draft (Alex Sarr, who played in Australia prior to being selected, was the No. 2 pick) being international selections. Is the United States losing its luster as the basketball empire of the globe?
"I think there are things that Europe is doing better than we are in terms of training. I feel a bit defensive about the American players because it's not for a lack of a work ethic," Silver said. "In Little League, you have pitch counts for young pitchers. If you look at what's happening in AAU, in many cases, you have young players playing 6-8 games for two-to-three days at these tournaments. And I get it, if you're a young player and that's the game that Rick Pitino's coming to or whatever else, and you and the people around you feel he needs to see you play and your knee's throbbing because you're 15 years old, you're still going to play.
"And I think it's another area that the NBA needs to get more involved in, and we've had these discussions with the NCAA just to have more oversight over youth basketball, because there's nothing more important to us than making sure that those elite players grow up to be team basketball players and not just have great skills but understand how to win games."
Silver has been the NBA Commissioner since succeeding David Stern in February 2014.
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Yahoo
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WCWS' mad carnival meets an NBA Finals stunner: Two days in Oklahoma City's sports vortex
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The Women's College World Series championship round has a one-night head start and some complications from being an outdoor sport played after a deluge, but it, too, has thousands of people pushing through the gates to watch. A city that didn't exist a century and a half ago, a town off the major-sport grid when century started, is the latest magnetic north for sports. But seeing it is believing it. Two days, one city, two championship events separated by 7 miles and juxtaposed in scope and spirit. The people here might insist the local ethos threads them together. To an extent, this is true. But the Women's College World Series feels intimate, very much of this place even as the sport swells in popularity. The NBA Finals? That's an everywhere phenomenon, as hard as anyone tries to rope it in. And the local basketball club increasingly belongs to those far beyond city limits. The tension is kind of cool. There's ambition and audacity all over a big place that's big, but also isn't. 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The queue to meet Hansen snakes through the softball Hall of Fame well before the appointed 5:30 p.m. start time. LIMIT TO 1 ITEM PER PERSON, per the sign at the head of the line. Efficiency is paramount when people of all ages and allegiances fill and refill the space; a Texas fan even gets Hansen to smile and flash a 'Horns Down' sign in a picture for posterity. Advertisement 'Perfect,' Hansen says, and it's on to the next neon yellow orb to inscribe. Across the parking lot, there's less of a wait for a different kind of special guest: The Larry O'Brien Trophy, soon to be awarded to a new NBA champ, sits inside a small tent and is available for still-life picture-taking. (As long as patrons download the NBA app first, naturally.) Inside the park, along the third-base concourse, it's a bacchanal of artery-cloggers: a booth for funnel cakes and corn dogs, another for hand-popped kettle corn delivered in bags as big as a toddler, another for Big O's Pork barbecue fare. Red and black and burnt orange everywhere, broken up by more than a few club softball jersey color schemes. Some 12,000-plus, shoulder to shoulder, happily waiting to consume whatever's next. Is Texas Tech stretching an hour before the game something? Anything? Here, yes, apparently, as Red Raiders faithful line the first-base wall to watch. 'The fans showed out,' Texas coach Mike White says after a Game 1 win, cinched by a two-run single from Longhorns catcher Reese Atwood on what was supposed to be an intentional walk from Texas Tech ace NiJaree Canady. 'I've never had that happen to me,' Atwood says, not long after Canady could be heard sobbing in the hallway outside the interview room. Only in the throes of softball's mad carnival. Advertisement A slow burn removes the cloud cover the next day, putting some literal light on downtown visitors filling $10 pay lots and office-dwellers taking lunch breaks in Thunder gear. (It's not everyone. But it's enough to suggest a few peppy intra-office memos were sent this week.) For some, this will forever be an NBA franchise appropriated from elsewhere. For those who enjoy the team being here, however it got to the corner of Reno Avenue and Thunder Drive, it's likely motivation to double down on some parochiality: a metro area pulling a team close and shouting for more than 17 years. This return to the NBA Finals, though, might be loosening the grip. Everyone may have to learn to share. A young and energized group, led by the league's young and energized Most Valuable Player in Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, is not darling. They're closer to the next version of the Golden State Warriors, mesmerizing young fans coast-to-coast and burrowing into their bandwagons. You can imagine a generation chopping it up about 'OKC' without caring a whole lot about what the letters stand for. Maybe the actual OKC is OK with that. Not far from Paycom Center, there's a Flaming Lips Alley and a Kings of Leon Lane and a Mickey Mantle Drive. Entities grounded around here, one way or another, that became property of a much wider world. This seems to be a matter of acceptance, not resentment. 'I don't do a whole lot of traveling anymore,' says Andrew Smith, Duncan, Okla., native and the general manager at Fassler Hall in the city's Midtown neighborhood. 'But if I was out in Chicago or in New Jersey and I saw people in a Thunder jersey, I would think that was amazing. Because it's our team.' Advertisement Finding Fassler Hall isn't entirely intuitive — it's off the street, with an arrow pointing you up some stairs in the same direction of an orthodontic arts office — thus the rebranding. Massive white Gothic lettering on the back wall of the building, in fact: Thunder Hall. The same logo adorns the black T-shirt worn by staffers, too. 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USA Today
16 minutes ago
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Former SEC star thinks Oklahoma will be ready for Michigan game
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San Francisco Chronicle
19 minutes ago
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Mr. Clutch: Tyrese Haliburton keeps delivering in the ultimate moments for the Pacers
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — You are Tyrese Haliburton. You went to the Eastern Conference finals last year and got swept. You went to the Olympics last summer and didn't play much. You came into this season with high expectations and your Indiana Pacers got off to a 10-15 start. And on top of that, some of your NBA peers evidently think you are overrated. You got angry. 'I think as a group, we take everything personal,' Haliburton said. 'It's not just me. It's everybody. I feel like that's the DNA of this group and that's not just me.' The anger fueled focus, the focus became confidence, and the confidence delivered a 1-0 series lead in the NBA Finals. Haliburton's penchant for last-second heroics — one of the stories of these playoffs — showed up again Thursday night, his jumper with 0.3 seconds left going into finals lore and giving the Pacers a 111-110 win over the heavily favored Oklahoma City Thunder. The Pacers led for 0.0001% of that game. It was enough. 'When it comes to the moments, he wants the ball,' Pacers teammate Myles Turner said. 'He wants to be the one to hit that shot. He doesn't shy away from the moment and it's very important this time of the year to have a go-to guy. He just keeps finding a way and we keep putting the ball in the right positions and the rest is history.' Haliburton is 4 for 4 in the final 2 seconds of fourth quarters and overtimes in these playoffs, all of those shots either giving the Pacers a win or sending a game into OT before they won it there. The rest of the NBA, in those situations this spring: 4 for 26, combined. If Haliburton takes one of those beat-the-clock shots in the first three quarters of games in these playoffs, he's a mere mortal, just 1 for 7 in those situations. But with the game on the line, he's perfect. 'You don't want to live and die with the best player on the other team taking a game winner with a couple seconds left,' Thunder guard Alex Caruso said. No, especially when that best player on the other team is Haliburton. Just ask Milwaukee. Or Cleveland. Or New York. They could have all told Oklahoma City who was going to take the big shot and what was probably going to happen. Against the Bucks on April 29, it was a layup with 1.4 seconds left that capped a rally from seven points down in the final 34.6 seconds of overtime. Final score: Pacers 119, Bucks 118, and that series ended there. In Cleveland on May 6, it was a 3-pointer with 1.1 seconds left for a 120-119 win — capping a rally from seven points down in the final 48 seconds. At Madison Square Garden against the Knicks on May 21, a game the Pacers trailed 121-112 with 51.1 seconds left, he hit a jumper with no time left to force OT and Indiana would win again. All those plays came with a little something extra. His father, John Haliburton, got a little too exuberant with Giannis Antetokounmpo after the Bucks game and wasn't allowed to come to the next few games; the ban has since been lifted. Haliburton did a certain dance that the NBA doesn't like much after the shot against the Cavs. He made a choke signal, a la what Pacers legend Reggie Miller did against New York a generation earlier, after hitting the shot against the Knicks. But on Thursday, all business. These finals are a long way from over, and he knows it. Game 2 is Sunday night in Oklahoma City. 'Again, another big comeback but there's a lot more work to do,' Haliburton said. 'That's just one game. And this is the best team in the NBA, and they don't lose often. So, we expect them to respond. We've got to be prepared for that. We got a couple days to watch film, see where we can get better.' Haliburton is in his first year of a supermax contract that will pay him about $245 million along the way. He has the Olympic gold medal from last summer and surely will be a serious candidate to play for USA Basketball again at the Los Angeles Games in 2028. He's now a two-time All-NBA selection. And he's officially a certified postseason, late-game hero. Three more wins, and he'll be an NBA champion as well. The anger is gone. Haliburton was all smiles after Game 1, for obvious reasons. 'Ultimate, ultimate confidence in himself,' Turner said. 'Some players will say they have it but there's other players that show it, and he's going to let you know about it, too. That's one of the things I respect about him. He's a baller and a hooper and really just a gamer.' And in his NBA Finals debut, Haliburton reminded the world that's the case. 'This group never gives up," Haliburton said. 'We never believe that the game is over until it hits zero, and that's just the God's honest truth. That's just the confidence that we have as a group, and I think that's a big reason why this is going on.' ___
